This sub has become more morose and despondent than perhaps it’s ever been. In some ways this is odd coming out of the trump years, but I understand that very immediate crises can often make depressed people feel less depressed by making them more outwardly focused — and that the attempt to return to something like “normal,” especially one that we all recognize as being so toxic and destructive, can be even more traumatizing than daily assaults on democracy by an openly demented president and his death cult of a party.

And clearly there are some very deep interconnections between our state of depression/anxiety and collapse. The true sense of depression is that it makes everything feel worse and heavier; it is like gravity being turned up to 11. Sometimes the only salve seems to be doom scrolling in places like this, where the immensity of the problems we face are at least recognized and engaged with rather than ignored and denied.

Still, we seem to have turned a corner of late, and I hope it is only temporary: there are more tales of young people coming here and being emotionally scarred, of people losing loved ones to collapse related depression, and of people regretting having children. All of this is posted alongside almost rage filled refutations of anything remotely hopeful or optimistic — just a screed of assertions that “we’re all fucked..nothing can ever possibly save us..get over it!”

Except, no matter how deeply some people feel that in their bones, there’s no concrete logic to it at all. We used to talk about Guy McPherson (who i railed against constantly as a fear monger), a man who predicted that we would ALL be completely extinct by NOW, many times over. One of his earlier assertions was that based on all his very real calculations, and all the feedback loops nobody but he understood, we should all expect to be completely EXTINCT by the summer of 2018. Other writers like Umair Haque from Medium, get posted here over and over for just speculating on the most dire and extreme scenarios. Even Chris Hedges, who we seem to adore here and who is an absolute darling of the known propaganda network, RT, often just lists and enumerates every terrible thing going on in the world with a disjointed conclusion that the end must be nigh. In this way he’s no different than the apocalyptic preachers of decades and centuries past.

All this is to say, we must remember, that as dire as some things in fact are, a number of our favored voices are creating click bait, and the way to sell their books and to get a following is to be MORE extreme and more dire than the last guy. But telling young people that there’s no hope and that people should be ashamed of having kids just because some of us are very (understandably) reticent to do so, is not actually helpful, constructive or moral. You’re not being “brutally honest,” you’re merely spilling your deepest fears with an air hubristic certainty that is unwarranted.

You don’t have to buy into this next bit to see that there are other pathways to some sort of future, at least a future worth living as much as any deeply challenging time and place has been worth living in humanity’s long, troubled history. But I for one find it almost certain that we will attempt and ultimately have some sort of success with geo-engineering in the near future. Logic demands it because 1. It is ultimately not that difficult, and 2 even the greedy bastards that got us here recognize that they lose absolutely everything unless the planet is cooled. The “billionaire saviors” are already discussing plans, but in less than ten years, when the calamities are so much worse and the technological know-how is even better, we will for example not be able to resist cooling the planet via particulate dispersal (mirroring the process of volcanoes). It is in fact relatively easy, could be done today, and I’m sure we’ll mess it up quite a bit, but the main point here is not to believe in the redemption of geo-engineering, but that your doomer certainty is not absolute, and that you’re not helping (at all) by pretending that it is. Yes, we will inevitably have immense challenges, casualties, catastrophes and other horrors to face down this century. And that is what we must do. Just as in all of history before now.

I’m quite sure if some really tried to turn their doom scrolling into persistent “positivity scrolling” for even a week they’d come away with a shift in perspective, that “ok maybe there is a future worth living, maybe even for my kids.” And beyond that, that maybe there’s even a slim chance we’ll reverse a warming planet, not perfectly and not before some terrible calamities befall us either from environmental fallout or our geo-engineering missteps, but enough to allow for some sort of long term tomorrow.